Call and receive output from Python script in Java?

You can include the Jython library in your Java Project. You can download the source code from the Jython project itself.

Jython does offers support for JSR-223 which basically lets you run a Python script from Java.

You can use a ScriptContext to configure where you want to send your output of the execution.

For instance, let's suppose you have the following Python script in a file named numbers.py:

for i in range(1,10):
    print(i)

So, you can run it from Java as follows:

public static void main(String[] args) throws ScriptException, IOException {

    StringWriter writer = new StringWriter(); //ouput will be stored here

    ScriptEngineManager manager = new ScriptEngineManager();
    ScriptContext context = new SimpleScriptContext();

    context.setWriter(writer); //configures output redirection
    ScriptEngine engine = manager.getEngineByName("python");
    engine.eval(new FileReader("numbers.py"), context);
    System.out.println(writer.toString()); 
}

And the output will be:

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9

As long as your Python script is compatible with Python 2.5 you will not have any problems running this with Jython.

I've looked for different libraries like Jepp or Jython, but most seem to be very out of date.

Jython is not "a library"; it's an implementation of the Python language on top of the Java Virtual Machine. It is definitely not out of date; the most recent release was Feb. 24 of this year. It implements Python 2.5, which means you will be missing a couple of more recent features, but it is honestly not much different from 2.7.

Note: the actual communication between Java and Python is not a requirement of the aforementioned assignment, so this isn't doing my homework for me. This is, however, the only way I can think of to easily perform what needs to be done.

This seems extremely unlikely for a school assignment. Please tell us more about what you're really trying to do. Usually, school assignments specify exactly what languages you'll be using for what, and I've never heard of one that involved more than one language at all. If it did, they'd tell you if you needed to set up this kind of communication, and how they intended you to do it.

You can try using groovy. It runs on the JVM and it comes with great support for running external processes and extracting the output:

http://groovy.codehaus.org/Executing+External+Processes+From+Groovy

You can see in this code taken from the same link how groovy makes it easy to get the status of the process:

println "return code: ${ proc.exitValue()}"
println "stderr: ${proc.err.text}"
println "stdout: ${proc.in.text}" // *out* from the external program is *in* for groovy

First I would recommend to use ProcessBuilder ( since 1.5 )
Simple usage is described here
http://stackoverflow.com/a/14483787
For more complex example refer to
http://www.javaworld.com/article/2071275/core-java/when-runtime-exec---won-t.html

I've encountered problem when launching Python script from Java, script was producing too much output to standard out and everything went bad.